ALFREDO JAAR: I strongly believe in the power of a single idea.
So the most difficult thing for me is to arrive at the…
at the essence of what you want to say.
And when you reach that…
that essential idea, it’s…
it’s extraordinary.
I could say that everything I know about art
I learn it when studying architecture.
I approach art as an architect.
And as an architect I give myself a program so this program will…
will take into account a space.
Studying that space I...I…
I try to reach what we call the essence of the space.
And then I combine that essence,
that finding with the essence of what I’m trying to say.
Every single element has been thought of in design.
Nothing is arbitrary, absolutely nothing.
The work has been fabricated by engineers or by…
by people who have the right skills for the right installations I’m working with.
I’m at a point where the most fascinating process for me is just
to think, to think, to think and to think.
And uhm, and then to let someone else execute the project.
I have been incapable in my career to ever,
ever create a single work of art that is just coming from my imagination.
My imagination starts working based on research,
based on a real life event, most of the time a tragedy that I’m just starting to analyze,
to reflect on it and to...to accumulate information.
But the original impulse is…
is this real life event to which I’m trying to respond to.
So in the case of Rwanda,
I started following the tragedy from the beginning.
I was outraged, how we were told, this is happening, this is happening.
Yesterday 35,000 bodies were recovered,
they were floating on the Kagera River, 35,000 bodies.
And it was just a five-line story on page 7.
So.... So I was following this story and I reached a limit and I thought,
well I have to go, I have to go.
I have.... There is something I would like to say about this.
And then so I just went.
And it was the most horrific experience in my life.
I was getting into huge dilemmas, how…
how do you present this, respecting the dignity of the people you are focusing on?
So that’s why THE RWANDA PROJECT lasted six years and it’s my longest project to date.
I end up doing 21 different pieces within those six years and they all failed.
That’s why I kept going,
looking for the perfect way to communicate to my audience that experience.
And of course there is no way.
There is this huge gap between reality and its possible representations.
And that gap is impossible to close.
So as artists we have to try different strategies of representation.
And THE SILENCE OF NDUWAYEZU
is just one more attempt to represent a very difficult and tragic situation.
When we say a million dead, it’s meaningless.
So the...the strategy was to…
to reduce the scale to a single human being with a name, with a story.
And that helps the audience to identify with that person.
And this process of identification is...is fundamental to create empathy,
to create solidarity, to create intellectual involvement.
The text at the entrance tells you a story.
I visited a refugee camp and Nduwayezu was seated on…
on the stairs of a door...a school that they had recreated inside the refugee camp.
Nduwayezu actually saw with his own eyes his mother and his father killed with machetes.
His reaction was to remain silent for approximately four weeks, he couldn’t speak.
For me, the heart of an exhibition is really the spirit of the artist.
The spirit of what he’s trying to communicate.
I want people to...to walk in that space and to feel that they have
entered into a model of thinking and of looking at the world.
Coming back to...to Chile, coming back as an artist is…
is an incredibly moving experience.
It was incredibly moving for me to share my work for the first time
with all of my friends and family.
It was almost like starting from scratch,
because they were experiencing it for the first time.
It’s a very, very emotional situation, incredibly emotional.
At...at the age of five, my father decides to move to this French island called Martinique.
And we lived there for ten marvelous years.
And then at the age of fifteen, my father announces,
okay, we’re going back.
And we moved back to Chile which was during Allende’s period.
And so we arrived in a...in a country incredibly divided.
I’m so obsessed with…
with communicating a very specific amount of information to the audience.
And uh, one very important element is the economy of means.
Muxima is divided in ten cantos.
And each canto in itself is...is structured as a haiku,
which is a short Japanese poem.
What, what fascinated me about haikus is the…
the capacity for fifteen, seventeen words to communicate an entire world.
My way of thinking is pretty Cartesian and it’s coming from my French education.
I’m...I’m very logical.
To make sense for me is…
is a very essential aspect of the work.
I was incredibly shy when I was a kid,
so my father took me to a psychiatrist
and the psychiatrist gave him two or three choices to help me to overcome this shyness.
So he brought me home a little box of magic.
And, and I got into this world and I became a magician.
And to be a magician helped me to confront the audience.
And to do something when they knew that I was trying to hide something, but they don’t see it.
What they see is the magic.
Before moving into filmmaking I was an actor and I did a lot of theater.
I wrote plays and I directed plays.
And so when you combine the world of magic,
the world of theater and so those two things plus my…
my background as an architect, everything is there.
And, and that mise-en-scène that you see is really a result of those things.
I had forgotten about this stuff. (LAUGHS)
I think it’s important to incorporate a beauty in the work because it’s part of life.
But that doesn’t mean we should just stay with beauty.
And we should not be afraid sometimes to confront beauty and horror
and LET ONE HUNDRED FLOWERS BLOOM probably does that in a very direct way.
And it’s based on a Chinese poem that Mao used to…
to throw a campaign asking intellectuals to
participate in the life of the revolution in the ‘50s.
“Let one hundred flowers bloom, let one hundred schools of thought contend.”
After one year, because intellectuals were suspicious of Mao’s intentions,
they finally gave in and they started speaking out.
And of course they gave great new ideas,
but they were contrary to the ideals of the revolution.
And then their voices were suppressed.
So here this piece is standing as a metaphor for the struggle of intellectuals all over the world.
Here we have a hundred flowers being submitted to contradictory forces.
On one hand they are being fed with water and light
and on the other hand they are being killed by strong industrials winds and strong cold.
These flowers will be dying continuously.
We will keep replacing them.
And what connects this particular work that was shown in Rome for the first time
with the Santiago situation is that instead of a video that we had in Rome with Gramsci’s grave,
here we are opening a window into the Alameda.
We are less than a hundred meters away from the La Moneda,
from the presidential palace where our socialist president, Salvador Allende,
was killed during the military coup by General Pinochet.
This piece is really making a link with the immediate history of our country.
By opening a little window into this gallery that happened to be on the Alameda uh,
a world of connection is created.
And...and that I think is extraordinary, the power of art to do those things,
to create connections, to make bridges and that fascinates me.